The Eichmann Trial “PROPHETIC MIRROR REFORE MANKIND”

Press, Volume C, Issue 29554, 1 July 1961, Page 10

The Eichmann Trial “PROPHETIC MIRROR REFORE MANKIND”

IBu JULIUS STONE, Challis Professor of International Law and Jurisprudence. University of Sydney, an official observer for the International Commission of Jurists.! (Reprinted by arrangement with the "Sydney Morning Heiald i

The khamsin. Jerusalem's sirocco, blew cruel and torrid from the Negev Desert as our Boeing reached Lydda at the end of May. In its longest spell for 30-odd years, the khamsin was with me almost until I left. A khamsin at 90 degrees to 100 degrees is not helpful in assessing the legality and fairness of trial procedure. So that after the passport check at the outer gate and its guards, a firearm check at the inner, and a' final check at the Court door, it was a relief to find that the Jerusalem courtroom was air-conditioned. Those who complain that publicity, emotion, and drama must impair the course of quiet justice in this courtroom of the Jerusalem BethHaam cannot have watched the Eichmann trial for very long. No doubt at the gates, in the lobbies, in the huge room for press correspondents from 100 States, with its cabling and postal facilities. hustle and excitement abound.

But this comes mostly from the exigencies of the world news services; and it would have been ground for complaint if the facilities were not there. The rest conies from transient foreign visitors arriving all agog to glimpse the famous process. This very bustle outside indeed, is really a tribute to the solemnity within. A lof'y but unadorned assembly hall —as its name implies—is broken at one end by a capacious balcony, at the front of which I sat, faring at the other end the Presiding Judge, Mr Justice Landau, of the Israel Supreme Court and his two brother Judges, with witness stand on the right, the dock on the left, and counsel's tables between. I knew Judge Landau's neighbours: so I knew that after each day’s sitting, he would sit long at his piano playing Bach on the most harrowing days and Mozart when it was not too bad. The Immobile Accused Watching and listening day by day, my whole mind should have been always on counsel and Judges and the legal standards they observed. Inevitably, however, it was Eichmann in his bullet-proof dock where one's eyes came to rest, as witness followed witness, and document after document was admitted or rejected by the Court. There had been a press story that during some of the most terrible testimony given here, of which the truth was unchallenged. Eichmann had remained immobile except for momentarily picking his nose. This was hard to believe. For no one. whether innocent or 1 guilty, could, one would think, be impassive before such testimony. Testimony of thousands of men and women shot, pushed into mass graves and covered with lorry-loads of quicklime even before the last writhings and twistings of life had ceased: others packed standing like lifeless objects in goods waggons, for days of transport in the freezing winter with destination death, if not en route then at the end: of the routine “selection" parades of concentration camp inmates for slaughter, so that women sick to death rouged their cheeks to look healthy and strong, and children put stones in their shoes to seem tall. . . .

All this to its grim and sinister accounting—read by the prosecutor. Mr Gideon Hausner, from the original German official documents of the Third Reich’s Ministry of Economics. So many railway waggons each containing so many thousands of men’s suits, so many thousands of men's shoes, so manv thousands of women's skirts, costumes. shoes, and so many thousands of gold teeth and fillings, and watches, all collected for the benefit of the Volkdeutsche. with more care •'han the deaths of the despoiled owners were noted . ; A mere bystander was har. rowed: how could the accused; feel less" I never saw Eich-I rnann pick his nose. Yet I did! see him for days on end sit immobile wedged against the back of his chair. Only did he lean forward to make a note, or to find from his bulky files, some document offered in evidence by the prosecutor, or challenged bv his own counsel, Robert Servatius: or to signal Servatius for a brief conference over their private microphones. The Concern Of All Save for the two armed I guards behind Eichmann, and' a third at the open side of; his bullet-proof dock towards the Judges. Eichmann seemed i like a minor public servant! hearing grievances from the; citizenry, and determined to pay attention even when he was most bored. His hands rested quietly on his lap the fingers of the right hand curled in parallel around the first finger, or the thumb and first finger, of the left hand But during the most terrible narratives, when the court-' room seemed to fill with an endless procession of those | who had suffered and died. | the right fingers might uncurl I from around the left, and j Eichmann patiently reclasp I his hands, this time interi locking the fingers. Onlv this! , No other sign or movement j either of face or body! And though the International Commission of Jurists had asked me to watch the trial as a lawyer I fell to speculating as a in our mid-twentieth century . generation of men. Everyone i who had yet written about the trial had. so it seemed, missed a main point, whether they applauded it in the name of "historic justice.” or; whether for diverse reasons of diverse merit. they frowned on it. Surely. I thought, the final significance of the trial concerned not Jews or Israel, or Germans.!

or even Nazis, as such, but rather every man. woman and child of every people in the world. Hitherto, from Cain and Abel onwards, human beings have mostly remained human to each other even in the act of killing. The brand on Cain's forehead served finally, after all, not to separate him from mankind, but rather to mark him as a man who had killed another man. It would have been senseless so to brand a ferocious lion or tiger. The brand of Cain is to mark both Cain and Abel as men. Hands Clasped Did the occasional bare clasp and reclasp of Adolf Eichmann's hands mean that a generation had arrived feeling no relation of common humanity as they kill other men, pursuant to a coldly calculated plan? And this led to other anxieties which afflict an international lawyer. It recalled a world in which hydrogen weapons have flung into chaos principles of humanity long believed to underlie the rules of war-law designed to mitigate the savagery of man to man. These weapons depersonalise the killing process even more surely than any psychological conditioning. They interpose distance and mechanical contrivances between the human actors and the horrors they perpetrate. Responsibility for the killing gets back only in the merest tricklets to technologists and scientists who invent weapons, to technicians and industrialists who make them, to the tnen who take the political decisions leading to their release, along with the men who touch that Anal button.

The psychological conditioning to the callousness and sadism which herded millions of human beings into the gas chambers, crematoria, and mass graves of the Nazi regime is, of course, different from the dilution of responsibility produced by technological warfare. The Nazi horrors did require, even for the leadership, a degree of face-to-face relationship between the butcher and victims; though direct personal initiative of Eichmann has proved (as I observed in Jerusalem) the most difficult part of the case that Gideon Hausner was trying to make against him. Mass Slaughter Moreover, there is an enormous difference in legal and moral responsibility between using weapons of mass destruction in wartime against a combatant enemy people and the Nazi mass slaughter of peoples with whom they were not at war, but whom they decided to annihilate while they had them at their mercy. There remains, therefore, a vital difference of individual moral and legal responsibility between those who engage upon mass slaughter of peaceable peoples as did the Nazis against Jews and Poles and others, and those who make decisions about the use of new weapons in war time against a combatant enemy. And this should never be obscured by muddled thinking or sentimentality. Yet we must also recognise that, on the level of the dehumanisation of human relations and the possibility of survival of human society, both these horrors drive in the same direction.

Here, indeed, on the threshold of an epoch of depersonalised killing may lie the deepest meaning of Eichmann's trial. Whether Eichmann be guilty or not, the undisputed detailed evidence of Nazi murderousness, now for the first time placed on judicial record, has held a prophetic mirror before all peoples. Not just before Germans or Jews, or democrats, or Communists, or Fascists but before all of us, as men, as brothers in the family of mankind. And in this mirror, if we can dare to look, is to be seen the face that men shall have, if (which God forbid) Cain and Abel cease to know each other as brothers, even in homicidal strife.

I shivered in the comfortably air-conditioned courtroom, and welcomed the sultry glast of the khamsin as I left.